Yordan Ivanov 📈

Start writing postmortem incident reports. Incident reports provide a comprehensive overview, a root cause analysis, a timeline of the steps taken to resolve the downtime, and a list of action points to prevent similar issues. They are a fantastic way to learn from mistakes and share knowledge with your audience. Share your reports in Slack or Confluence. Sometimes, you can even share those on LinkedIn and seek advice from your network.

My favourite approach for long-term ambitious projects is to organise weekly adjustment calls. Keep these short. Use the first call to communicate the big picture. Use the rest to assess your progress, discuss any blockers, and adjust your plans. Posting a summary in a public Slack channel after each call is essential. This ensures that everybody is on the same page.

Being late in your career is great. It means you have a ton of experience and understand all the concepts. Here is the truth: New tools follow the same concepts. They have some improvements but follow the same concepts under the hood. Having this in mind, you should do this: 1. Check LinkedIn, Reddit, or YouTube. 2. Pick one tool relevant to the modern data landscape in each area. 3. Think of a small project you can build. 4. Build your project only using new tools. It will take much time, but it will be worth it.

Here's the truth: Nobody will congratulate you if you start putting over hours. People will expect it as a part of your duties. You need to communicate priorities and boundaries with your manager. You will often find nobody expects you to spend more time than you need to. If you are not looking for yourself, nobody else will. If too much is on your plate, you must drop some priorities or hire more people. It's not your job to work all the time. But it is your job to communicate risks.

There are many types of databases. Some have indexes; others don't. Some require vacuuming; others do that automatically. You need to understand how your database works behind the scenes and what access patterns you have. Based on this information, you may need to reorganise your storage, rewrite queries or optimise metadata. Sometimes, you may find you need a different technology.

Feedback is among the best gifts you can receive. Concrete feedback is a great learning opportunity. You should look for feedback early and often. Do not hesitate to employ design reviews, peer programming and code reviews.